Sometimes I think I should go back to themed Fridays. If I did, today’s theme would be ‘Man, this stuff is cool.‘
Problem: I can’t repeat awesomeness like this every week.
We went to the Southeastern Raptor Center for their bird show this evening. I only shot video of one little guy, because they flew him right by me:
He posed for pictures later:
Here’s another cool thing. If I had any talent at triathlons at all, I would do this:
And perhaps the coolest thing today is Sir Patrick Stewart. (I have this sneaking suspicion he is the coolest thing going a lot of days.) If you have seven minutes, you should watch this video. It is powerful, true-to-life stuff:
Also, the in-laws are in town this weekend. Extra cool!
To stand on a field in the uniform of her country as the national anthem plays requires a long journey. And not just because of the flights involved.
“It’s just my family and everything that I’ve gone through to get to that point,” Seoposenwe said of her thoughts in those moments. “How hard it was getting into the national team. Just going from not wanting to play with women, or girls, to now stepping onto a field with girls that are so talented and so good at what they do.”
It was one of those rides where you do a few things surprising, while not doing other things. This is not a disappointment. You huff a little, you sweat a little. You might think it is a bit late in the year for that sort of thing, but you see that sun sinking and you realize you notice that it is falling earlier. And that you noticed that is important, because you know you’ll soon wish for more days when it was warm like that, and you had scenes like this:
Lantz has raised more than $100,000 for charities over the course of his 13 IRONMAN races, but his focus isn’t just on the money. “I always pick a person who needs added inspiration in their life to go with me on the race,” he explains. He laminates a small picture of the person to carry with him on the course, proudly holds the picture up in his own finisher photo, and then gets a keepsake from the race to give to the person. “I want them to have something to remind them of their worth in the eyes of God, and my love for them,” says Lantz.
One such person was Josh Lucio, a boy with NF1 (neurofibromatosis Type 1) from Mesa, Ariz. “What Josh has had to endure is far more challenging than doing an IRONMAN,” says Lantz. “Despite his severe scoliosis and having tumors around his heart, he is a positive human being and a warrior. If I was able to play a small part in helping him stay focused and healthy, then I’ve used my IRONMAN journey to bless another.”
Lantz raced for Josh at IRONMAN Lake Tahoe, struggling to make it over the finish line before the 17-hour cutoff. “I had to finish for Josh at all costs,” Lantz recalls. “He watched me cross the line from his house.”
Allow me to make you rethink the entire second half of your 1997.
Face/Off came out in June of that year. And now I’m going to shake it all up. What if they were miscast? What if Travolta was originally Castor Troy and Cage was FBI agent Sean Archer, and they switched?
In the inevitable remake, I vote for Robert Pattinson versus Taylor Lautner.
Podcasts! Here are two of them. First, looking around the SEC.
And, second, trying to unwrap the Auburn enigma while looking at foreboding statistics:
Chadd there was my first radio mentor. Great guy. Learned a lot from him. Still do.
links / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off on On design, tea and today’s quality of life 21 Sep 15
I have a friend who is a designer. Specifically an architecture, communicative environment, and product design specialist. Basically he creates things, and judges the rest of the things. I think that’s what he does. Interesting fellow. Full of explanations for how things work, why they work and, sometimes, how things ought to work.
He’s the sort that, when you talk to him enough, you start trying to imagine what he’d say about this handgrip or the size of that door knob or the spacing of those signs. It is the shared experience of understanding his experience, while having no qualifications whatsoever to match his experience.
if you’ve ever seen a photograph of a right angle sidewalk and the path worn in the grass cutting the corner labeled “Design” and “User experience” then you understand that. I felt like that today:
So I sent him that picture. And he simply wrote back “Like there’s need for such a thing as un-sweet tea.” Which I took to mean, “There’s no need to wax on about the employee addition of non-linear, open-manipulated, closed-environment design systems using upward communication for uncertainty avoidance. Let’s just say we only need one, you know, for the real tea.”
Which is a hard argument to overcome, as far as I can tell.
I will watch every one of these I see, because they are all amazing and unique and wonderful and provide the glimpse of young people that we all need from time to time. And this one is local:
The problem, the doctor said, is that these advances happen slowly over time, so you probably don’t hear about them. If cancer survival rates improve, say, 1% per year, any given year’s progress looks low, but over three decades, extraordinary progress is made.
Compare health-care improvements with the stuff that gets talked about in the news — NBC anchor Andrea Mitchell interrupted a Congresswoman last week to announce Justin Bieber’s arrest — and you can understand why Americans aren’t optimistic about the country’s direction. We ignore the really important news because it happens slowly, but we obsess over trivial news because it happens all day long.
Expanding on my belief that everything is amazing and nobody is happy, here are 50 facts that show we’re actually living through the greatest period in world history.
Unfortunate as it is when someone has to visit a doctor for a procedure, I’m always interested to hear about the latest thing and the faster recuperation or the newest therapy. Everything, as Louis C.K. says, is amazing:
And, in both of those phrases, I do not know what is happening.
I also swam 3,000 yards. So I’m tired, sure. But it feels great, too. That’s all unexpected, but then I took a rest day, no exercise, earlier this week and at one point I didn’t think one day would do the trick, but by the end of the evening I was ready to get back to it. I wonder how long I can keep all this up. Not long enough.
was founded on April 1, 1949 by Charles E. Miller and is now into its third generation of family ownership. Originally employing three men, it now operates with 55 highly skilled workers. Present facilities include offices, two manufacturing plants and a machine shop consisting of 78,000 square feet.
They’re still in wire, and they’ve been working in polyurethane since the 1980s. I believe that campus building was built in the late 1960s, but I couldn’t say when the door went in.
Miller is far too common a name to ask Google to scare up anything definitive.
Here’s something to know for sure: I want to be this guy when I grow up. Peaking at ninety:
Richard Dreselly first hiked to the top of Mt. Washington in New Hampshire in 1941. He has since hiked the 6288 foot summit seventeen times. Now at 90, he climbed for what he says will be his last time. Globe photographer John Tlumacki captured his three day arduous journey amid the stunning mountain views.
Here’s the full story that goes with that photo gallery.
And a podcast with my old friend Chadd. He’s talking about what it takes to be an athletic director in college sports.
